Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

In my last post, I asked the question, can science tell us what we ought to do. My short answer there was “not really.” I’d like to elaborate and modify that answer. Science is a far better method for answering all of the questions that concern human flourishing than any other approach we have, including religion.

Consider this question: What are the valuable questions to have answered in our efforts to live a good life? And once we have a sense of what these questions are, let’s think about the different approaches we might have to answering them. Here are a number of candidates in no particular order:

How can I live longer? What will make me healthy?Which vices am I prone to? Which virtues are the hardest to obtain?What are the best methods for achieving virtues and avoiding vices?Which cognitive practices are best for cultivating happiness and fulfillment? What sorts of lifestyle choices will produce the most happiness and fulfillment? What sort of education and treatment will be most effective in my children’s education? What sorts of treatment and what kind of parenting will do my children the most good? The most harm? What are the best ways to discourage criminal behavior in myself and others? What are the relative harms of various behaviors?What are the benefits of various behaviors? What sorts of social environments are most conducive to human flourishing? Which social circumstances are the most detrimental to human flourishing? What sorts of social relationships do humans need in order to flourish? What are the most effective means for avoiding and defeating addictions? What sorts of choices are most effective at preventing addiction? If we seek to improve the lives of others, where are our efforts most productively directed? What are the dangers of technological innovations? How can we best prevent and treat disease? How can we rectify famines, plagues, droughts, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters? How can we build the best infrastructure for human societies? What sorts of job pursuits, and working conditions are most conducive to human flourishing? What are the best methods for establishing public safety? What are the best methods for education? What are the most effective methods for rectifying inequalities and bias? What are the best methods for eliminating human pain and suffering? What makes humans sick? Which treatments can cure them? Which are the best medical treatments? What harms does poverty do to humans? How much alcohol is good for humans? Is smoking a healthy habit? Do drugs do harms to people? What are those harms? Which methods of birth control work? What sort of family structure and family relationships are most conducive to human satisfaction and success? What are the differences between people’s perceptions of the truth and the truth? What are the best methods for achieving mental well-being? What are the negative and/or positive effects on humans of environmental factors such as air, water, and noise pollution? Which political systems achieve the high degree of human freedom, fulfillment, and happiness? What are the effects of various features of an economic system on the welfare of the humans in it?

It seems to me that science is vastly better qualified and demonstratively successful at giving us answers to all of these questions whereas religion fails horribly, or just has nothing to say about most of them. What resources are available to the Christian religion, for instance, for addressing these questions? The Bible is a collection of scattered writings from a variety of Iron Age authors that contains some opinions about some of these matters. But as the idiosyncratic views of just a few under-informed writers from pre-industrial, agrarian cultures, they are of limited use and often just flatly mistaken. Personal, anecdotal opinions about empirical matters are notoriously unreliable, even when these opinions come from wise, experienced sources. We won’t take seriously the claim that the views about these matters in the Bible can be trusted because the authors are channeling some infallible divine source. There are far too many gaps, confusions, contradictions, and flat out mistakes for that to be true. If the Bible authors got their information from some supernatural source, that source has proven himself to be highly unreliable. The musings of a church leader, or the recommendations from a pastor’s sermon aren’t much better since they too are subjective, biased, and anecdotal.

But carefully constructed, double-blinded clinical trials on medications, or large scale, objective analyses of data from scientific investigations give us real, accurate answers. When we gather large amounts of data with methods that are designed to prevent filtering and bias, and then when we evaluate that data actively looking for disconfirmations of a hypothesis using the established principles of sound empirical research, we do a far better job at getting at the truth than any other method.

If you care about human well-being, including your own, it is hard to imagine a single topic where science is not prepared to give you a better answer that is based on the facts. And what is a moral system if it doesn’t take the well-being of humans or sentient beings as its central aim?

Science is absolutely central to informing us about what we ought to do.

22 comments:

CybrgnX
said...

The problem is the nature of the question. Religion is NOT about quality of life because all the religions are about death. The 'soul' is all important and what will happen after death.There is exactly 0% proof that there is a life after death but that is immaterial because that is what is believed. When looks from this point(as if it is TRUE) then the religious answers are the only good answers.Of course the above is pure BS. As religion is really about political power of the few over the many. But you can't get the many to think straight because the happy delusion is preferred to the unpleasant truth in their eyes.It is sad but the only cure is to wait for them to die off without infecting too many before the event.

Remember, when you start possessing the woman or the man, you are killing – you are putting the flower in the safe-deposit box. And you rush to the court to get married; you are making it a legal thing. Love dies when law comes in. Love cannot exist with law. Love is lawlessness. Love is so spontaneous, how can it exist with law? It is impossible. Love has disappeared from the earth because there is too much law. Unless law disappears from the earth, there is no possibility for love to appear again. And without love there is no possibility of prayer. And without love there is no possibility for God.Religion does not consist of laws. It consists only of one thing, and that is love.

You go to a doctor and if you have any disease he can diagnose it in a very clearcut way. He can diagnose if you have TB or cancer or this and that; a thousand and one diseases. But if you are healthy, he has nothing to diagnose. In fact medical science has nothing to define what health is. At the most they can say that you are not ill, but they cannot be very definite about what health is. Health remains undefined. It is so big that no category is big enough. It cannot be pigeon-holed. Happiness is bigger than health. Health is happiness of the body. Happiness is health of the soul.

If something is real, it is going to be confusing because the real is so vast that it contains contradictions. And if something is very clear, beware! -- it is going to be something false. Mathematics is very clear. The most clearcut science is mathematics because it is completely man-oriented. If man disappears, mathematics will disappear. It is just a man-manufactured thing. It is clear. It is from man, it is from the mind. It is the most clearcut science in the world because it is the most bogus science. It corresponds to no reality. It is simply symbolic, just in the mind. But if you seek reality, you will find it very confusing. You love a man and you find that you also hate him. It is very confusing and books don't say that. They say if you love a man, you love him; you never hate him. But that's philosophy. If you love a man, you hate him also. If you are happy with a man, you are also unhappy with him. Otherwise with whom are you going to be unhappy? Books say that when you love a man, you love. When you are happy with a man, you are always happy. That is nonsense. It is not a real thing; it is just a concept. Reality is chaotic. It is wild... it is very stormy.

Practical medical science is predicated on a belief in design, function, and purpose -- all of which are denied under darwinian, materialistic, atheistic assumptions.

The darwinist cannot say that the heart is designed, or has a purpose, or a proper function. If he does, he's cheating, importing the language of teleology. He can only say, this is what is, this is what nature has spewed out -- it's neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, proper or improper.

Nor can a darwinist say that a heart is normal vs. abnormal, properly functioning vs. malfunctioning, working as it is supposed to, etc. because the heart was never designed and has no purpose or function; it just "is".

Nor can a darwinist or materialistic atheist say that cancer cells are bad -- they are just another manifestation of nature, and nature is neither good nor bad, it just is.

A person may be a confessing atheist, but, when it comes to actually living life, he invariably lives it as if theism -- design, purpose, intent, etc. -- were true.

And, I wouldn't make too much of science. Science can tell you the protein value of eating another human being; it can't tell you if or why it is wrong to do so (as long as it is well-cooked).

Dude, you need to read some philosophy of science. The Darwinist is perfectly entitled to use teleological language without contradiction. Or put another way, there's no reason we can't use teleology in the absence of a magical super being who is responsible. That's no more problematic than saying that rocks want to roll down hill. Or do you think that commits us to attributing minds to rocks? MM

The fact that a darwinist feels compelled to use the language of teleology means that there is something very odd indeed about the universe. It wasn't designed, it isn't designed, things just "happen", and that is it -- and yet darwinists either are unwilling or unable to provide a scientific description of this "happening" without recourse to the language of design

I guess, like indwelling moral sense -- the absurd notion that some things are right, other things are wrong, it's just another one of those weird quirks of mindless evolution -- wire humans to perceive and think and speak and live of design, where in fact there is and can be none.

It's another one of the absurdities of the human condition that exist if God doesn't. But, I suppose that fits darwinism in a way -- one would not expect the universe to be rational, or for human perceptions about the universe to match the way it really is in a universe just slopped together by an unthinking, amoral, utterly purposeless process.

On the other hand, all the existential absurdities of the human condition -- moral sense, design predisposition, purposeful, meaning, values, etc. etc. become perfectly reasonable, rational and understandable once one understands that there is indeed a Creator, and we are indeed a creation.

I think there is a stubborn resistance to this idea that extends beyond mere honest rational thinking.

All of these so-called anomalies have been explained in Darwinian terms over and over--You're attacking a straw man. See Sober, De Waal, Tooley, Dawkins, Gould, Dennett, Kitcher, Bechtel, Bedau, Cummins, Godfrey-Smith, even Plantinga, Papineau, and so on.

Secondly, it's a deep misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection to characterize it as "Things just happen," for no reason, or at random. This straw version has been corrected so many times that I have to conclude that you haven't bothered to find out what the theory of natural selection is, or your deliberately misrepresenting it.

Thank you for the references -- it is good of you to provide these. I'm familiar with less than half of the authors you cite, but remain convinced that teleological language and darwinism are incompatible. By "things just happen" I mean some live, some die -- there is no purpose and no selection. E.g., natural processes did not "select" the earth for life and not mars. The term selection implies some kind of mind at work (and there is some evidence that darwin thought of nature in this way), where, according to the materialist, there is none.

Ball, you are out to lunch. Wish I could tell you on your own site, but I don’t want to register just to tell you that you are bunkfull. Thanks for this link. Its nice to call you out where you don’t have the power to censor people

Your semantic arguments about the use of the words “designed” and “purpose” are rather elementary. The shorthand offered us by the limits of the English language in no way prove the existence of your imaginary sky friend, nor do they pose any problem to the demonstrated facts of evolutionary biology. It also implies that the English language somehow “belongs” to your theology, when history suggests your theology was developed by Middle Eastern goat herders a couple of thousand years before modern English developed on the other side of a continent.

As for your complete misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution, reducing it to complete randomness. I have to concur with Matt and say you are talking out of your ass. There is a random element to genetic changes, but “Natural Selection” is in no way random, and no one seriously suggests it is (strawman much?).

As for your mental masturbation over on your own page about the source of “morality”, this is also an area discussed at length by greater minds than yours, and it seems much less of a paradox for them. What is your morality? People don’t eat their young. Of course, neither do bears, chickens, or caterpillars. (Most) Christians pair-bond for life, (some) Moslems live in polygamous relationships. Geese pair-bond for life, frogs don’t. Who is more moral? Soldier ants willingly die to protect the community, but also keep other ants as slaves. Some people willingly die for their communities, we call them heroes and hold them up as examples of morality, just as we used to hold the keeping of slaves as moral. Of course, now we don’t. So if your morality comes from your perfect Deity, why is it so amendable?

Matt, a colleague of mine just tipped me off to your website. I have been kicking against the goad for years trying to get more professional philosophers to acknowledge what you defend here: that moral facts exist and can be discovered by science.

I can't recall if we've met (I've spoken in Sacramento several times for atheist community groups), or if you're aware of my work. But if you would do me the favor of reading my book Sense and Goodness without God and commenting on the merits of the case I lay out there for a syncretist model of secular moral realism, I would appreciate it greatly. If you are willing to do that, I will gladly send you a free copy (email me an address: rcarrier@infidels.org). In it I address both Hume's and Moore's arguments against our project, and employ the recent anthology Moral Discourse and Practice as well as some of the recent published science of happiness.

If you don't already know, you can find out more about me via my blog (just follow my avatar), which also links to my website. But for a precis of my argument, there is a video of a talk I gave on this subject (stripped of all the qualifications and scholarly references and other details, but giving the gist of my case) that you can access here.

If you like where I'm going with this, then please take a look at my book, and if you are pleased enough with that (we needn't agree on every point), let's try to find more professional philosophers thinking like us and coordinate, so we don't all feel like lone wolfs against the establishment!

It's wrong to state that Science is "essential" to morality. It plainly is not. This appears to be a very an extremely pro-science argument rather than a pro-rationality or pro-scepticism way of thinking.

The more satisfactory arguments is that neither science nor religion are prerequisites for morality. Morality is intrinsic not only to human beings but other complex animals. Morality existed long before the creation of scientific research and, I'm sure, before organised religion.

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to realise that humans are built with a moral conscience. I just don't think its helpful in the debate to try and link morality to science somehow. I understand that all you are saying is that science can help us carry out our good moral intentions but those intentions need to be there in the first place. If those good intentions are not there and instead there are intentions to do harm then science can conversely be used to cause harm.

If you are also suggesting that the progress of Science is steadily making us a more morally good race I would also take issue because we all know that the theists will immediately point to all the recent wars and they have a point.

It amuses me that the pro-religious side are increasingly willing to engage in the morality debate. I like to think that it signifies a shift in thinking in the average person towards the pro-sceptic view point. In religious-atheist debates the morality card always seems to be played by the pro-religious person late on in the debate when they feel a bit bogged down by all the straight-forward and easily understandable rationalisations coming from the other side. A morality argument from the religious side always sounds like a "yes I know religion is all non-sense but what about its good moral influence" statement.

Thanks, Bowling. Knowledge of what humans are is essential to morality. Science is necessary to acquire knowledge of what humans are. Therefore, science is essential to morality. I think the point I'm making is so obvious, it's trivial. Someone who disagrees should try to live for a day without any of the benefits or knowledge that science has provided us with.

Bowling said this: "I understand that all you are saying is that science can help us carry out our good moral intentions but those intentions need to be there in the first place. If those good intentions are not there and instead there are intentions to do harm then science can conversely be used to cause harm."

Matt McCormick responded with this:"Thanks, Bowling. Knowledge of what humans are is essential to morality. Science is necessary to acquire knowledge of what humans are. Therefore, science is essential to morality. I think the point I'm making is so obvious, it's trivial. Someone who disagrees should try to live for a day without any of the benefits or knowledge that science has provided us with. "

I understand and agree with Bowling. I am not sure I understand what Matt is saying.

What do you mean we need to understand what humans are? Do we need to strictly define what it means to be human e.g., is a zygote is human? I doubt you mean that.

Or are you saying we have to be self conscious? Aware of what we are? Are you saying just by being self conscious we are doing science?

Do you think there was ever a time when a human was not doing science? If so do you think it was impossible that they were acting morally?

My book is out:

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Atheism

Author:

Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.